(3 of 4)
In its charting of the ebb and flow of war's malignant tides, the movie ruthlessly sends its heroine into action for both sides; yet she proves to be neither turncoat nor indecisive fool nor coward. Dr. Helga Reinbeck (played with passionate intensity by Europe's fast-rising Maria Schell) is serving as head nurse in a German field hospital. By a ruse, a band of partisans whose own doctor is severely wounded succeeds in kidnaping her. After the partisans' doctor dies in her care, they offer her a grim choice: help us or follow him. The decision tears Helga in two, not because she fears execution, but because she must measure her narrow patriotism against her involvement in all mankind, her diminution by any man's death. "I always believed," a partisan chief (Bernhard Wicki) tells her, "that to a doctor, wounded enemies are also human beings." Placing humanity before country, Helga sets to work with all her strength. But her lifesaving chores bring her no sense of exaltation, no expiation, no liberty pass from the anguished no man's land that lies between her warring loyalties.
The movie relentlessly propels Dr. Helga Reinbeck toward a pitiless, inescapable end. Typhus cuts down scores of the Yugoslav fighters. Their medicine supplies run out. Helga and a woman partisan (Barbara Rutting), veiled in the garb of Moslem peasants, steal into a Nazi-held town to retrieve a cache of drugs concealed there. After the other woman is killed, Helga, bearing the medicines, sets off alone across a bridge, ignoring the fusillades that crackle from both banks of the river it spans. Then the enemies, in one of those little miracles that sometimes momentarily halt a war, recognize her as a figure of mercy transcending their strife. Both sides call for a ceasefire. Dr. Helga delivers her package to her enemies, staggers back toward her German compatriots, collapses upon the bridge. The cease-fire was ordered too late. A stray bullet—little matter whose—has mortally wounded her.
The midday sun sears her still form, lying quietly in the dust. She is herself a fallen bridge between mankind's sundered parts. For a moment, before the small arms shatter the brief truce, Helga Reinbeck's silence is louder than all the guns.
Battle Hell (Wilcox-Neagle; DCA). Britain's pride in her navy is amply documented here in a superbly realistic re-enactment of Britain's own "Yangtze incident." In the spring of 1949, when the Reds were taking control in China, the British frigate H.M.S. Amethyst steamed up the Yangtze, bound for Nanking, to bring supplies to Britain's embassy. The Chinese Communist army, deployed on the Yangtze's north bank and preparing to make many crossings, opened up on the Amethyst, clobbered the vessel without provocation, nearly sank her before she ran aground. This all happened before Korea, but what followed was a good clue to the Chinese Communists' knack for flitting without pause from atrocious war fare to attritious negotiation — a harbinger of Panmunjom and the 24-month palavering that, even now, grinds on in Geneva.